Twenty years ago it was push-button dialing. Now it’s “push pages.” AT&T Corp. is at it again. As Webmasters hone their servers to provide more specialized information for narrower groups of users, AT&T is pushing World Wide Web pages through cyberspace with the numbers on a telephone keypad.

Consumers Car Club is beta testing a new service from AT&T that melds Car Club’s Web site with AT&T calling services. The pilot, known as Project iA (for instant answers), is taking a unique step in increasing interaction with customers surfing for new cars on the Web.

Consumers Car Club, which acts as an intermediary between 1,600 car dealers and customers who don’t want to haggle to get the best price, is the first customer of the AT&T service, which the telecommunications giant plans to roll out commercially early next year.…

Much like the engine that runs our cars, hard drives are a physical operating component of our everyday computers, which is why a hard drive crash is incredibly catastrophic. See, the hard disk drive is a data storage device that is found inside our computers which is used for storing, retaining, and retrieving data for whenever we need to use it, or whenever we simply open up our computers. When you experience a hard drive crash, you will see a blue screen on your computer, and no matter what else you do, you won’t be able to open or access the files inside. Now sometimes, hard drive failures don’t necessarily mean that the data is completely wiped out but instead, just not readily accessible. Other times though, it’s a different story. So what to do?

This is the weekend you’ve been looking forward to for a long time: a combination ski and snowmobile trip with your family and your best friend. The weather is perfect. It is a crisp morning with lots of blue sky and an acceptable temperature for winter–45 degrees. The plan is to take to a trail before lunch.

Knowing you have only the weekend, it is hard to fight the temptation to just get on the snowmobile and start down the first trail you see.

“But wait!” Have you asked the most important question before leaving civilization for the great unknown? That question is “What if…?”

What if the weather suddenly turns colder and a biting wind blows up? What if, while you are out on the trail, a blinding snowstorm develops and you can’t see where you’re going? What if …

Dolcy Campbell was talking about the Berwyn, Illinois, home that she, her husband and their three children bought in March 1992.

Yet less than a week later, they put up a “For Sale” sign and made plans to move. Why the sudden change?

Like most of Berwyn’s citizens, the Campbells are hard-working, law-abiding people–with one difference. Most people in Berwyn are white; the Campbells are black.

The day after they moved in, while they were unpacking, someone threw a rock through their window. Three days later, they awoke to find the house’s front porch aflame and the glass front door shattered. Though no one was injured, the police immediately gave them 24-hour protection.

The attacks severely shook the Campbells, radically altered their lives, and tested their faith in people.

“5.6 Billion Served!” It may sound like the claim you see at a well-known fast-food restaurant. But it’s not hamburgers. It’s how many people our planet must serve, or support, with food, clean water and air, raw materials for clothes, medicine, and the other necessities–and luxuries–of life. Every year, the number of passengers on spaceship Earth increases by 100 million. By 2020, scientists estimate the Earth will need to support nearly 8 billion people.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, books like The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth predicted major disasters because of unchecked population growth. These books said the Earth could not feed the expected population of the late 1970s. These predictions did not consider advancements in agricultural science.

The new pyramid replaced the long-standing, four-food-group pie chart that has been used to teach nutrition since the 1950s.

Adoption of this pyramid came about after much research, revision, and expense. In fact, the original pyramid was ready to be presented to the public in the spring of 1991. But representatives of the meat and dairy industries voiced their concerns that this pyramid portrayed their food groups in a less positive light than did the decades-old pie chart. After a year of additional research and testing, the USDA came out with a revised version that is supported by the meat and dairy industries, as well as a number of health and consumer groups.

A Look at the Levels

Take a close look at this Food Guide Pyramid. At the bottom is the bread, cereal, rice, and pasta group, the largest …

It’s no secret that hiring independent contractors has its pluses: You don’t have to shell out money for payroll taxes and you can skip the insurance benefits paperwork. But beware: If you directly hire someone as an independent contractor–whether it’s a freelance graphic artist to design your business brochures or a technology consultant to help you set up your Web site–your legal responsibilities aren’t completely lifted. You may be surprised to learn that hiring independent contractors can create liabilities for you.

Liability Loopholes

Sure, business owners who use independent contractors aren’t as liable for worker negligence as when they hire full-time employees. Let’s say you hire Eddie, a full-time employee who makes pickups and deliveries for your publishing business. One day, while Eddie is driving work to the printer, he hits a pedestrian who sues both of you. If Eddie …

Consider the case of Mikasa v. Mikasa. One makes fine crystal and china. The other makes fine soccer balls and sports equipment. Although the two unrelated companies share a brand name and a geographic region, they’ve coexisted peacefully. After all, there’s little chance that a customer will mistakenly buy a soccer ball to place on the dinner table or accidentally kick a fine goblet past the outstretched arms of a goalie. But now, both companies want to be on the Internet as mikasa.com. And on the Internet the chance for confusion is high. It’s easy to conceive of a customer shopping electronically for porcelain and typing www.mikasa.com, only to be surprised by an offering of baggy shorts and odd spheroids. The reverse could happen too.

In a lawyer-free world, the logical compromise would be for one company to become …

Like a growing cadre of industry experts, Connie Henry knows what it takes to get integrated services digital network (ISDN) hooked up in an office. Henry coordinates telephone companies’ installation of digital phone line service for Jetstream Communications’s customers. ISDN has become the high- speed Internet access of choice for business owners fed up with waiting hours to download graphics- heavy Web pages. It also allows products such as Jetstream’s Front Desk to provide the same top-quality telephone-handling features that you thought were only available to big business.

But getting an ISDN line up and running is not as easy as adding a second telephone line. The horror stories you’ve read and heard about the service are true. ISDN-speak includes an entirely new vocabulary, from switch type and version to NI-1 signaling and D-channel packets. You call to place an …

This is the story of a story that’s been rewritten so often, I should’ve used disappearing ink. In an effort to capture the online investment juggernaut on paper, the editors of this magazine gave me $70,000 (virtual money, of course) and told me to have fun. That was almost two years ago, and the original assignment involved comparing the investment options available on AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. But halfway through the project, my research became outdated when Internet investing took off. Then, when the online services changed their offerings and pricings, my work was rendered further irrelevant. Months later, I was sent back to square one again as new companies launched and old ones merged or moved their offerings. This brings me to a key caveat: The online investing world changes really fast.